From Heatblur FB,Cockpit texture
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hnnnngggghnnhh ill be in my bunk gents.
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As a massive nerd reading about their depth of simulation:
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Ability to store and display three waypoints, a fixed point (FP), an initial point (IP), a surface target (ST), a home base (HB), a defended point and a hostile area;
>Tfw when everyone comprehends this.
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BLOODY HELL! BOMBCAT!
Proper bombcat is almost as good as an intruder, innit kome?
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Just almost…
But can it Iron Hand?
I dont see why you can’t hang a HARM off of the glove stations.
dae Google?
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https://mxdoc.com/queue/airforces-monthly-special-f-14-bombcat.html
This text told me the HARM was trialled and adaptors made to fit them to the glove stations but the trials were abandoned due to budget cuts. The adaptors later came to good use when they enabled the kitties to lug around LANTIRN pods to good effect.
So yeah, no Iron Hand for the bombcat. At least not the way God intended it to. On the other hand, a tomcat does carry a metric crapton of fuel and stuff. Put a buddy tank on it and it enables an F/A-18 to do some HARM. Because that bird was a fo’ sho’ Iron Hand machine. And on the gripping hand, who needs historical accuracy? If they were to go fight WW3 against the soviets, you betcha they’d gone on to hang HARM, harpoon and all the other goodies and gizmo’s off the big cat.
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I knew that, but everyone keeps throwing around the cancerous word “Bombcat” around , so I figured I’d jerk everyone’s chain.
Saying you need a HARM for DEAD is like saying you need a Porsche to get to work. It’ll do the job, but it’s not always the best choice, nor is it often the right choice.
Generally speaking you go to war with the tools you have, not the tools you wish you had. Even if we went to war with the Soviets, there was this other twin engined Grumman war horse that did that sort of thing much more efficiently. I’ll take hypothetical AIM-120s and AIM-152s over moving dirt like a peasant any day.
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If the A-6 had gone the way of the dinosaur before the balloon went up, the tomcat would have had to take a lot of the long range strike slack.
You are right shooting HARM at an emitter is not the only way to deal with it. I’d rather deal with a tombstone that way though than going in with my hair on fire and a brace of rockeyes under my wing.
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Assuming the war lasted longer than a week with a nice big sequence of booms for the grand finale, yeah they’d probably rush through the testing to make that happen. I don’t think they’d just jury-rig the stores to the jet and call it good though…
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Eeeeh I wouldn’t be shooting harms at a tombstone either, SA-20 is Terrifying
Well you cant just tell the boss “naw I aint goin there boss, its too scary”. There’s gotta be some way to deal with it. I think a HARM saturation attack is one. Perhaps combined with things like SLAM and AGM-130?
That’s a rather tight chicken and egg situation though. The A-6 outlived the USSR by half a decade. It was only retired because there was no USSR, and the navy figured any other enemy could be defeated by 36 hornets as well as it could by 10 Intruders. This goes double for the F-14B and D fleets.
This starts getting into the territory of maximum acceptable risk and SEAD topics, which don’t necessarily pertain to the F-14. TL;DR Stealth Aircraft, MALDs and BGM-109s. HARMs don’t offer much help if their max loft distance is still within the MEZ of the SAM, and the SAM can either shoot you or the missile down, or decide to pack up and motor somewhere else. Double digit SAMs are not to be trifled with.
BGM-109 and MALD would still be a saturation attack. And a very expensive one to boot. But I guess the double digit sams are that good that a saturation/kamikaze attack is the only way to go huh?